Related papers: Distinguishing between convergent evolution and vi…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…
Computational inference of dated evolutionary histories relies upon various hypotheses about RNA, DNA, and protein sequence mutation rates. Using mutation rates to infer these dated histories is referred to as molecular clock assumption.…
Estimation of molecular evolutionary divergence times requires models of rate change. These vary with regard to the assumption of what quantity is penalized. The possibilities considered are the rate of evolution, the log of the rate of…
Phylogenetic mixtures model the inhomogeneous molecular evolution commonly observed in data. The performance of phylogenetic reconstruction methods where the underlying data is generated by a mixture model has stimulated considerable recent…
Reticulate evolutionary processes result in phylogenetic histories that cannot be modeled using a tree topology. Here, we apply methods from topological data analysis to molecular sequence data with reticulations. Using a simple example, we…
Observations that rates of molecular evolution vary widely within and among lineages have cast doubts upon the existence of a single molecular clock. Differences in the timing of evolutionary events estimated from genetic and fossil…
Phylogenetic mixture models, in which the sites in sequences undergo different substitution processes along the same or different trees, allow the description of heterogeneous evolutionary processes. As data sets consisting of longer…
Phylogenetic networks describe the evolution of a set of taxa for which reticulate events have occurred at some point in their evolutionary history. Of particular interest is when the evolutionary history between a set of just three taxa…
Divergence time estimation requires the reconciliation of two major sources of data. These are fossil and/or biogeographic evidence that give estimates of the absolute age of nodes (ancestors) and molecular estimates that give us estimates…
Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) are widely used to study trait evolution. However, many evolutionary histories involve reticulate evolutionary scenarios, such as hybridization, that violate core assumptions of these methods. In this…
The reconstruction of a species phylogeny from genomic data faces two significant hurdles: 1) the trees describing the evolution of each individual gene--i.e., the gene trees--may differ from the species phylogeny and 2) the molecular…
The number of fixed mutations accumulated in an evolving population often displays a variance that is significantly larger than the mean (the overdispersed molecular clock). By examining a generic evolutionary process on a neutral network…
Comparative and evolutive ecologists are interested in the distribution of quantitative traits among related species. The classical framework for these distributions consists of a random process running along the branches of a phylogenetic…
To understand biological diversification, it is important to account for large-scale processes that affect the evolutionary history of groups of co-distributed populations of organisms. Such events predict temporally clustered divergences…
Search for possible relationships between phylogeny and ontogeny is one of the most important issues in the field of evolutionary developmental biology. By representing developmental dynamics of spatially located cells with gene expression…
Different sources of information might tell different stories about the evolutionary history of a given set of species. This leads to (rooted) phylogenetic trees that "disagree" on triples of species, which we call "conflict triples". An…
We compare the phylogenetic tensors for various trees and networks for two, three and four taxa. If the probability spaces between one tree or network and another are not identical then there will be phylogenetic tensors that could have…
Developmental constraints have been postulated to limit the space of feasible phenotypes and thus shape animal evolution. These constraints have been suggested to be the strongest during either early or mid-embryogenesis, which corresponds…
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees relating species. Along branches, sequence evolution is modelled using a continuous-time Markov process characterised by an instantaneous rate…
We study the Tangled Nature model of macro evolution and demonstrate that the co-evolutionary dynamics produces an increasingly correlated core of well occupied types. At the same time the entire configuration of types becomes increasing…